commitment, conscientiousness, costly signaling theory, equilibrium selection, emotion, empathy, ethics, evolutionary psychology, fitness indicators, genetic correlations, good genes, good parents, good partners, human courtship, kin selection, kindness, individual differences, intelligence, mate choice, mental health, moral virtues, mutation load, mutual choice, person perception, personality, reciprocal altruism, sexual fidelity, sexual selection, social cognition, virtue ethics “Human good turns out to be the activity of the soul exhibiting excellence.” Aristotle (350 BC) Moral evolution theories have emphasized kinship, reciprocity, group selection, and equilibrium selection. Yet, moral virtues are also sexually attractive. Darwin suggested that sexual attractiveness may explain many aspects of human morality. This paper updates his argument by integrating recent research on mate choice, person perception, individual differences, costly signaling, and virtue ethics. Many human virtues may have evolved in both sexes through mutual mate choice to advertise good genetic quality, parenting abilities, and/or partner traits. Such virtues may include kindness, fidelity, magnanimity, and heroism, as well as quasi-moral traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, mental health, and intelligence. This theory leads to many testable predictions about the phenotypic features, genetic bases, and social-cognitive responses to human moral virtues. A

ABSTRACT: Most of us have a very firm belief in mental causation; that is, we firmly believe that our own distinctly mental properties are causally efficacious in the production of our behavior. This belief is dominating in contemporary philosophy of mind as a part of the causal explanatory exclusion problem for non-reductive materialists. I do not discuss the exclusion problem; rather, I assess the conception of mental causation that is presupposed in the current debate. I propose that in order to make sense of our firm belief in mental causation we need to operate with a broader conception of it than is normally seen, focusing on common-sense aspects concerning the timing, awareness, control, and tracking of mental causation. However, prominent studies in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience show that mental causation is not as self-evident, robust, and pervasive as our firm belief in it would suggest. There is therefore a tension between the common-sense, broad conception of mental causation and our empirical evidence for mental causation. A full defense of mental causation is not just a matter of securing causal efficacy but also of situating our notion of mental properties in relation to difficult issues concerning awareness, control, and judgment.

Sartre (1956) describes ways in which one may present oneself to others as being a certain sort of person. In one of his examples, a waiter presents himself as a waiter by, in a way, acting the part of a waiter. More generally, Sartre argues that, wanting to be, or at least wanting to appear to others to be, a person of a certain sort or character, one often acts the part of a person of that sort of character. Sartre denies that people have fixed characters in the sense that they actually are in themselves any of the sorts of people they present themselves as being. People merely pretend, sometimes even to themselves, to be one sort of person rather than another. Sartre takes such pretense to oneself to be a paradigm instance of what he calls “bad faith”. (The basic pretense to oneself, according to Sartre, is the pretense that one lacks free will and cannot do otherwise.) One may have actually acted bravely, or cowardly, in a friendly or unfriendly way, etc. in the past and one may have been a brave, cowardly, friendly, unfriendly, or whatever person on various past occasions. But that does not mean that one now is such a person. Because of one’s free will, nothing that is now settled can make it the case that one is such a person.

Sartre (1956) describes ways in which one may present oneself to others as being a certain sort of person. In one of his examples, a waiter presents himself as a waiter by as it were acting the part of a waiter. More generally, Sartre argues that, wanting to be, or at least to appear to others to be, a person of a certain sort or character, one often acts the part of a person of that sort of character. Sartre denies that people have fixed characters in the sense that they actually are in themselves any of the sorts of people they present themselves as being. People merely pretend, sometimes even to themselves, to be one sort of person rather than another. Sartre takes such pretense to oneself to be a paradigm instance of what he calls “bad faith”. (The basic pretense to oneself, according to Sartre, is the pretense that one lacks free will and cannot do otherwise.) One may have actually acted 1 bravely, or cowardly, in a friendly or unfriendly way, etc. in the past and one may have been a brave, cowardly, friendly, unfriendly, or whatever person on various

Simulated humans in computer interfaces are increasingly taking on roles that were once reserved for real humans. The presentation of simulated humans is affected by their appearance, motion quality, and interactivity. These presentational factors can influence the decisions of those who interact with them. This is of concern to interface designers and users alike, because these decisions often have moral and ethical consequences. However, the impact of presentational factors on decisions in ethical dilemmas has not been explored. This study is intended as a first effort toward filling this gap. In a between-groups experiment, a female character presented participants with an ethical dilemma. The character’s human photorealism and motion quality were varied to generate four stimulus conditions: real human versus computer-generated character � fluid versus jerky movement. The results indicate that the stimulus condition had no significant effect on female participants, while male participants were significantly more likely to rule against the character when her visual appearance was computer generated and her movements were jerky. 1

that moral psychology (viz. the empirical study of our moral judgments and behaviors)

Abstract: Several game-theoretical lab experiments helped establish the belief that economists are more selfish than non-economists. Since differences in behaviour between experiment participants who are students of economics and those who are not may be observed among junior students as well, it is nowadays widely believed that the origin of the greater selfishness is not the training they undergo, but selfselection. In other words, selfish people voluntarily enrol in economics. Yet, I argue that such explanation is unsatisfactory for several reasons. I also suggest alternative explanations for the observed differences, which have been so far unduly disregarded.

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